Stories about God

 

We live in a world where millions of people tell stories about God. There are collections of stories shared by millions, and collections shared by much smaller groups of people.

I “belong” to a group that shares stories that come from the Jewish people, followed by stories about the person named Jesus Christ, and all the stories that have resulted from his presence in human history.

From a strictly scientific standpoint, no one can “prove” the truth any of these stories. By “proof” I mean a story grounded in empirical observation and shared by a community of scholars who evaluate the quality of the observation and the quality of the theory that scientists tell as a result of their observations. (A theory is a story, a fiction, about what someone has observed.) That does not mean that all of the stories are  “false” or “myth.” Some of them are surely as true as any other story we tell in life—we just can’t prove the truth of our religious stories by empirical observation. We religious people “believe” the story we take as normative for ourselves. By belief we mean that we know the story is true even if we can’t prove it.

Religious stories tend to have characteristics that are different from other kinds of stories. They are different from scientific stories (theories), but they are also different from the stories grounded in everyday experience. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz, sixty years ago, proposed that people tend to approach the world with four different frames of mind.

The first kind is the common sense frame of mind, in which I implicitly develop a story about things I do from moment to moment as I go about my daily business. I don’t question anything, I just focus on the activity at hand. The second kind is the scientific frame of mind. Geertz says that the scientific frame of mind is characterized by an attitude of explicitly questioning everything. To a scientist, there is nothing that can be proven for sure. Every scientific theory can be overturned by observations that call it into question. Think of what Einstein did to Newton. But we cannot live in a scientific world view. We could never eat breakfast if we had to be sure that the milk we drink is not poisoned, and we can never be sure it isn‘t.

The third world view is the aesthetic world view. This world view revels in experience. We experience delight from seeing or hearing something produced on canvas or performed by a musical group, or something in nature like a sunset. That emotional delight is what we seek when we are looking at something aesthetically. We verbalize artistic experiences by expressions of delight and that verbalization is an artistic kind of story.

The fourth and final world view is the religious. Geertz says that this is similar to the first, common-sense, world view in that it is just taken for granted, like everyday life, but it deals with the most important issues in life, what the theologian Paul Tillich called “ultimate reality.” We do not try to prove the truth of stories in this world view. We take them as true and they ground our approach to the rest of our experiences.

In earlier ages, people developed the idea that anyone who did not share their religious story was bad, and had to be persuaded or compelled to change the story they were telling about “God.” This may have been the result of religious leadership becoming fused with political leadership—the king was both political leader and religious high priest. When you are living in a community of people who share the same stories about God, the intrusion of someone who doesn’t share those stories in uncomfortable and disorienting.

We are learning that it is possible for people to live together in peace even when they do not share the same stories about God. Possibly that advance in human culture occurred as a result of the experience of the founders of the United States. Those men had experienced the tragic effect of religious persecution in Europe, and they wanted to set up a society where no one would persecute someone else because of their religious beliefs.

My Roman Catholic community came to accept this approach when our church leadership, in the 1960s series of meetings of church leaders called the Second Vatican Council, said that every person’s conscience should be respected—if in conscience you accept a certain story of God, we should respect your belief and allow you to go about your business undisturbed.

To see religions as stories about God, and to accept that none of us can be absolutely sure about the truth of the story we accept, and to agree not to persecute people who share a different story, opens us to new experiences.

First of all, I may learn something about God from the stories other people tell about God. The stories in my tradition, both Jewish and Christian, have changed over the centuries. There are stories about God in Jewish tradition that I believe were changed by the experience of living with Jesus Christ. There are stories that the Roman Catholic community used to accept as true (for example, that charging interest on a loan will lead to bad outcomes) that Catholics later rejected. Moral beliefs are based on stories that describe bad outcomes when you do something.

There is no way for any group to prove the truth of its story. There is no “natural law.” What Catholics have called natural law is the set of stories about bad outcomes accepted in our community across centuries. Secular social science has come to reject the term “natural” in describing events that human beings experience. There are indeed features of our experience that seem to be biologically programmed, but it is very difficult to separate those from features that we have accepted because our societies have accepted them as true. Some people used to accept as true the story that the human race is divided into “races” that are innately superior or inferior to one another. Most people now reject that story. Ultimately all moral rules are the result of human agreement and learning.

To put it another way, the idea of natural law is a denominational belief accepted by some denomimnations. We and everyone else should be free to accept it or to reject it, following our consciences.

Much of the bitterness surrounding the issue of abortion in our country could have been avoided if we Catholics had quit treating our beliefs about human life as “natural law issues” and accepted the possibility that other people’s approaches to the legality of abortion can be based on their beliefs in conscience about what God wants them to do.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus gives to his disciples what Christians have come to call the “Great Commission.” “Go and make disciples of all nations.” (New American Bible translation of Matthew 28:19) The term "disciple" comes from the Latin word that means “to learn.” A disciple is a learner. To learn is to change your mind. We Christians are called to help all nations, including ourselves, to be open to changing our mind about what God is like and what God wants. We are all learners. As Jesus once said, “You have but one teacher.” (Matthew 23:8)

(Aside: The Greek of Matthew 28:19 does not use the term “disciple.” The Greek can be translated literally as “preach the gospel to all nations,” which is not the same as making disciples. Preaching does not presume that the preacher controls anything the hearer does about the message.)

There is a God. It’s just that none of us has a corner on what God is like, and we can learn from each other about what God is like. That kind of learning can be very enlivening and exciting.

A shortage of sinners

            Today’s Great Problem—the Problem behind many of our greatest other problems—is that we don’t have enough sinners.

The reason we don’t have enough sinners is that we don’t have enough sin. Without sin we are trapped in a space where we have no choices.

You see, sin implies that I am doing something that I can do differently. The Decision-Makers in our world today cannot do anything differently. They have no choice. Ask them. That’s what they will say.

Why is Mr. Putin trying to take over Ukraine? He will say he has no choice. It is his destiny to restore Russia to its ancient (imagined) glory. The Ukrainians opposing him say that they have no choice either: they have to oppose his dreams.

Why is Mr. Netanyahu killing tens of thousands of the people in Gaza. He has no choice. Gaza belongs to Israel, and the people who oppose that idea, Hamas, have to be defeated, no matter what it costs.

On the level of realpolitik, Mr. Netanyahu cannot stop the war in Gaza because stopping it will cost him his parliamentary majority. If the tiny minority party that is the key to his retaining a majority in the Israeli parliament should leave his coalition, his government would fall, and he would probably go to jail. Those people of the tiny minority party, the ones who believe that God wants every inch of ancient Israel to be controlled by a Jewish government, have no choice. God wants every Palestinian off the land, permanently, forever, never to return. What else can they do?

In all of this there is no sin. There is just blind fate, deterministic, out-of-control fate. We outside observers see what has to be done, but we know there is no one who can change the situation. We just have to wait for things to work themselves out.

There are no sinners. There are just pawns under the control of political and economic and social forces. We all understand this. We accept it. It is sad. It is a challenge to our dreams of a future governed by rationality and technology and even beauty. Things are definitely going in the wrong direction, but what can we do about it? We are powerless.

In earlier, less enlightened ages, there were sinners. Of course there were many people who did not see themselves as able to change, but there was a wider recognition that some of the actors in great dramas were actual sinners, able to change what they were doing and deliberately choosing to continue their bad actions. There was, at least I speculate and hope, a wider moral condemnation of their behavior and a recognition that there were other possibilities beyond blind political fate. Today that moral condemnation is gone, swallowed up in a consensus that, even though we construct our political and social systems, we are sometimes powerless to control them. It is easier for us to look at evil and say, “Sad, but what can anyone do? This and this and this will have to change before the situation can get better. And this and this and this are not likely to change in the near future. We are powerless.”

That’s an easy way to respond to evil. It is easy, but it is deterministic. It takes us off the hook, and it dampens our moral outrage. Those other people aren’t so bad. They have no choice.

My Christian worldview says that human actors have choices. We who look on may refrain from judging bad actors, and say that “they” have no choice. Do “they” know better?

My Christian world view says that all of us are free to do good and to do evil. We are free to change our behavior. We are free to accept forgiveness, if we are willing to engage with the people we have hurt. We are free to offer forgiveness, if we are willing to engage with the people who have hurt us.

My Christian world view says that the God of all creation, who created us as moral creatures, is willing and even anxious to forgive us, no matter how evil our actions have been. That God pleads with us to be as forgiving, and to be open to being forgiven, because. short of forgiveness, there is only death.

NPR this morning said that there are more children in the world today growing up in the midst of warfare than ever before in history. Every such child will continue in life with emotional and moral disabilities that will continue to harm them and everyone around them for years to come.

We are not doing well. We need more sinners. 

As I reflect on what I have written above, the name of William Shakespeare comes to mind. The stories he told could help us to see that people with great power are also moral actors. And his stories could make us think about what happens when powerful moral actors face decisions about evil in their own actions.

Who are you talking to?

         We are "christians," or at least we call ourselves that. 

        The most important thing about us christians is that we talk to God. 

        We are not the only people in the world who talk to God. But we can't worry about those others. They have to deal with God in their own ways, and God will deal with them in God's own ways. We've got enough trouble in our own back yard--we don't need to control everybody else. God can take care of that--of them. We say that God loves what God has made. God made them. End of discussion. 

        So we talk to God. 

        We do that because we know that God listens. We don't just think that God listens. We know it. That's what faith means. 

        But talking to someone else is an open-ended trip. It's open-ended in two ways. First of all, we never know how it will go. We don't control it. And second, we don't expect it to end. 

        But isn't that how it goes with other people in our lives? From our first moments, we never know how things will go, and we have no idea how the talk will end, if it will ever end. 

        There is a widespread walking away from religion in our "western" world. It is only natural for us christians to ask why that is happening. I think it is because we of the western world have become so engrossed in "eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage" (to quote Luke 17:32) that we don't have time to think about God, much less to think about having a conversation with God. Our western world is not all that unique in human history. 

        Since so many of us don't think about God, we naturally have forgotten how to talk to God, or how to listen to God.

        I found myself in that situation. Or, to be more precise, I keep finding myself in that situation. It is strange. I was raised in a pious family, spent my student years in pious schools, and have lived my adult life as a professional religious person. And still I keep finding myself wondering if I am really speaking to God. I'm never sure. So I keep on trying to be aware of who I'm talking to. 

        Here is where I have latched on to that ancient prayer book called the "psalter." 

        A psalter is a book containing "psalms," which are prayers meant to be be recited or sung as poetry. It's an old book, at least two thousand years old. My christian forebears have used it all the years since Jesus Christ walked the earth, and Jesus himself surely used it. There was a Latin saying "In David, Christus." David was supposed to have composed the psalms. The saying says that if you know the psalms, you know Christ. 

        If you know the psalms, you also know a lot besides Christ. You find yourself immersed in several hundred years of Jewish history, with all of its warts and wounds exposed. The psalms teach you to talk to God, but they also teach you about the messiness of being human, and how you are not likely to be any less messy than the men and women who prayed them before you. 

        The meanings of some passages are lost forever, but isn't that true of our own stories? Sometimes a psalm scolds us, but don't we need scolding ever so often? I used to be turned off by all the talk in the psalms of "enemies," but life has taught me that there are people in my world who can qualify as my enemy. They mean me no good. I'd rather not face them, but maybe I should face them more often and more openly. Conflict is not evil. It's uncomfortable, even painful sometimes, but if we do it with love, it is life-giving. They used to say, on Marriage Encounter weekends, "Sometimes you have to fight, but hold hands while you're fighting."

        My church (Roman Catholic they call it) has surrounded the psalms with the story of Jesus. They call it the "church year." It begins with Advent and Christmas, which recall the beginnings of his story, continues with Lent and Easter, and spends the rest of the year reflecting on the rest of Jesus's life. As I do this year after year, I begin to see how my own life can become patterned after his life. That includes his death, which, as I approach my ninetieth birthday, is more than likely for me not too far in the future. 

        And all the while, as day after day I take up my book of psalms (which today is on my Kindle--blessed be some technology), I feel close to all those women and men and even children who have gone before me, with all their warts and wounds. 

        The psalms help me talk to God, and even, every so often, to listen to God talk back. 

The danger of thankfulness

     Years ago I took part in a simulation exercise ("game") called, if I recall, "Starpower." The purpose of the game was to illustrate the dynamics of inequality and social class.

     Each of us participants was issued an envelope with tokens of some type. Some tokens were worth $25, some were worth $10, and some were worth $2. The tokens were spread around randomly among the participants. We were then told to bargain with one another for something--I forget what we were trying to "buy" with the tokens.

     I had more than my share of $25 tokens, and I was able to bargain very successfully. I remember very clearly my emotional response to the situation. I felt blessed. God had been good to me.

     Then I reflected. My blessedness was the result of random chance. I did nothing to "deserve" my advantage. God had nothing to do with my success.                                                                                                                                                                          

     The media I watch and listen to--mostly public broadcasting (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR)--are making me aware of what is happening as I write this: in Gaza, in southern Lebanon, and in Haiti. In these places people are seeing their homes destroyed, husbands and fathers killed in front of their families, women raped, and everyone lacking sanitation, health care, and even food and water. Here I am, living quietly in Quincy, Illinois. The trees have just shed their beautiful leaves, and people are preparing for Thanksgiving travel and Thanksgiving dinners. I am blessed.

     But what did I do to deserve this? Why was I not born in Gaza or Haiti?

     True, my parents worked to create a home where I could grow up healthy and without violence. What did they do to deserve the advantages that allowed them to raise me?

     Those gifts to them and to me were not only blessings from God. Many people contributed to those blessings. People left their homes in Europe and began new lives in this country. The men and women who founded this country struggled to set up a constitution that would "make it easier for people to live good lives" (to quote, I believe, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day's colleague in founding the Catholic Worker movement). A fair amount of struggle against violence and injustice made our "American" way of life possible.

     We all get used to things. We get used to our advantages, and soon we think it is normal for us to be advantaged, and that somehow that's the way things ought to be. We come to see ourselves as virtuous, and as blessed.  If we want to feel pleased and grateful, we see our blessedness as caused by our virtue.

     The danger is that we then begin to see other people's lack of blessedness as the result of their lack of virtue. That allows us to ignore them and to neglect seeing ways that our blessedness might have contributed to their troubles.

     Some politicians can accuse us of being "woke" when we talk about such things. But that is the kind of wokeness that Jesus and the Old Testament prophets tried to create in us.

     So in this Thanksgiving season, I am going to be grateful for the blessings I enjoy, but along with my gratitude I hope to be compassionate toward people who do not have the same blessings I have. I will think about how "but for the grace of God" I might have been in their shoes.

     Such thoughts might make me feel warm and cozy. But my mind must roam further and explore the stories of how some nations came to be poor and some nations to be rich. Sin may have played a part in creating my blessedness.

 

 

 

 

Machines and Games

 

        My recent reflections about "saintly institutions" got me recalling some old ideas from my sociology teaching days.

        The intro soc textbooks typically said that there were three or four lines of theory in sociology: functionalism, symbolic interactionism, conflict theory (Marxism), and rational choice theory. I thought that the last two could be considered sub-forms of the first two, which is not something that I want to go into here. I want to focus on the first two.

        Functionalist theory uses a living organism as the metaphor for how societies should function. Living organisms have structures like skeletons and circulatory systems, and each structure has a function. For example, the skeleton helps the organism  hold together, and the circulatory system nourishes the cells in the organism.

        An organism is just a highly developed machine. It is deterministic. When it is stimulated in a certain way, it responds in a certain way. If something from outside disrupts one of its functions, it corrects the disruption (homeostasis).

        The organic metaphor sees society as a set of structures (rules and laws). Each rule has a function. If we design the rules well, the organism will function well. When things aren’t going well, we revise the law. Our law library shelves get longer and longer, and we need more and more lawyers to navigate what we have created. Even behaviors that are not covered in the law books can lead to lawsuits, which means more lawyers and more restrictions on what we can do.

        The second line of theory is labeled "symbolic interactionism." Its defining metaphor is the game. The people playing the game make the rules, and most players obey the rules. When a lot of them don't obey, the players change the rules or create handicaps. This theory says that there are no divinely-sanctioned rules for living--all moral rules are arrived at by group consensus. This goes against my Catholic tradition, but I point to areas where my Catholic tradition has had to change what it considered "natural." For centuries the church forbade "usury," taking interest on loans. Somewhere around the 1500s it abandoned that moral principle. Somewhat later it quit accepting slavery as a permissible moral practice. Recently a top church authority (Pope St. John Paul II) said that capital punishment is immoral, a judgment echoed by most church authorities these days, in spite of widespread U.S. Catholic belief that it is still permissible.

        In other words, the Catholic community has changed its rules.

        An institution such as "the economy" is a set of games. When I said that no institution is saintly, I was saying that no institution operates like a machine. We cannot design an economy so that it will always operate with justice. When we try to do that, we can change the rules, and in the back of our mind we can hope that one more tinkering with the rules will make the machine automatically produce justice. But it won't. We are in a game, and there will always be some people who will break the rules. We can punish the rule-breakers (sinners), or we can hold back on the punishment (forgiveness) and consider modifying the rules to make the playing field more fair.

        In practice, both theories appear similar, but they differ in how we make moral judgments on their basis. If we believe that there are divinely authorized rules (natural law), then we see rule-breakers as worthy of punishment, and if punishment does not work, worthy of exclusion from society. ("Lock 'em up and throw away the key.") We tell ourselves that our punishment (prison) is remedial--we want prisoners to be rehabilitated so they can return to society as fully-functioning participants, but in most places we cannot find the resources needed to practice rehabilitation alongside punishment. Prisons in most places are designed for punishment, period. If there is rehabilitation, somebody is going beyond what the "correctional" institution is capable of. Such people are to be applauded, but the correction system cannot do more than punish.

        If we see our institutions as games, we are more open to modifying the rules without excluding rule-breakers from future play. We punish rule-breakers, but always with the assumption that the rulebreakers are just like us, and forgiving their violation may be better than punishing them. They may even be prophets calling us to make the game more fair. They are part of "us," not a cancer on the body politic.

        Our economic rules do need serious modifying. Most of us admit that the middle class has been shrinking, and that it is getting harder and harder to find decent housing, and affordable food and transportation. This is why we elected Donald Trump.

        Mr. Trump's backers are not likely to be open to changing any rules that will make the game more fair for people below them on the economic scale. They will say that the economy is a machine, and is working just fine. Rising tides lift all boats. Except that they don't. They will resist the idea that the game is set up so that more and more people cannot win. If they do not adjust the rules, the players will take their marbles and go home. They will abandon the game. They could vote Mr. Trump and his allies out in the next election, or they might decide that democracy will never work and turn to violent ways to get what they think is fairness. 

        In fairness to Mr. Trump, the Democrats have been no more likely to welcome changing the rules than backers of Mr. Trump. Voters have recognized this, and have punished the Democrats.

        To recap: our institutions are not saintly; people keep breaking the rules. There is no perfect structure that will prevent that. We should look at our institutions as games that require fair rules if we want people to keep playing them. Rule-breakers are not all evil, worthy of hell-fire. They are people like us, who want to play in our games. We should welcome them and listen to them. There will always be some people who will push the limits and break the rules, but when we decide that there are too many such people, we will change the rules of the game.

 

 

 

 

 

Saintly institutions

 

       Well, it's happened. Donald Trump is president.  There are no more saintly institutions.

        I grew up in saintly institutions. St. James Parish in Decatur, with its pastor, its church, its school. The city of Decatur, with its parks. The country, the USA, truly a blessed place. Victorious over Naziism and Japanese militarism.

        The Franciscan Order, with its seminary system, and their saintly faculties. And over all, the Catholic Church, with its pope and bishops.

        Added to those saintly institutions, some secular saints: science and technology.

        As a novice Franciscan in 1955 I was commissioned to write the script for a pageant celebrating the 60th ordination anniversary for a priest in our friary. My script celebrated the sanctity of everything in the Franciscan and Catholic world. I incorporated whatever music I could find that illustrated saintly triumph. A few years later I was commissioned to write another script celebrating something--it may have been the 50th anniversary of the founding of the seminary where we were studying. My script was even more triumphalist. I recall featuring a covered wagon and a campfire, with patriotic music. I involved every student in the seminary in its production--even the production had to be saintly. The friars in the Midwest were truly saints combining Franciscan virtue with American virtue.

        In grad school I received a secular vision of saintly institutions: functionalist sociology. The goal was to design perfect institutions that would run by themselves, freeing everyone in the society to pursue happiness. A society was to be like the human body, self-correcting when any outside force threatened one of its functions. Perfect laws would ensure a perfect (saintly) society.

        The nail in the coffin of Catholic saintliness was the revelation of sex abuse by clergy and religious. My experience of living fifty years in a religious community gave me more evidence that not all of us are saintly. More and more revelation brought down the image of saintliness of our American institutions: slavery, treatment of indigenous people in our land, present-day systematic injustice. All the things that Trump politicians label as "woke."

        Our culture says we should tamp down such revelations. Reinstate the vision of saintliness in America. We have no sinners.

 

 "There is no institution that human beings cannot mess up."

        I have promoted that statement for years. It was a statement of my experience. But I did not carry the statement to its logical conclusion: it means that no institution is saintly. There are sinners everywhere. We are the sinners. We will never design the perfect institution. We will never get all the laws needed to wipe out crime. We are not likely to be more virtuous than our ancestors.

        This is an old religious insight. It has not been a popular insight in our society with its image of itself as a saintly society. We keep thinking that one more law or ordinance will fix us. Our vision is too utopian.

  

Our Future under Donald Trump

        Mr. Trump and his allies are likely to mess up many of our institutions, and mess them up badly. In his last administration he allowed the Centers for Disease Control to be led by incompetent people, and when Covid hit, the CDC was not as prepared to deal with it as it would have been had it been better led. We can anticipate a flood of incompetent judges, decimation of efforts to mitigate climate change, legitimized persecution of those among us who are "not like us," (gays and transgender people), resurrection of Jim Crow-like behavior norms. We may see our military used against us. Fox news, talk radio, and social media could become our only sources of information about what is happening in our country and around the world. Foolish economic decisions could lead us into another depression.

        But let's be honest. Democratic administrations have not touched some of the root causes of our problems. The goal of wind and solar farms is to allow us to keep on doing what we have always done. No president since Jimmy Carter has dared to suggest publicly that we might need to do things we don't like to do. We may have to sacrifice something. Carter suggested sacrifice and was branded as a fool. We are living by a divinely sanctioned moral principle: "If I like to do something, you are not allowed to stop me from doing it." The effect of this principle is the legitimizing of monumental inequality. Our systems have risen up and swallowed us.

  

Repent!

      The figure of a hooded figure holding up a sign that says "Repent" is a comic staple. To repent means to stop doing something you are now doing. It means to admit that you are not saintly, and to follow up with that admission and do something to change your behavior.

        There will be saints and sinners in the Trump administration, just as there have been saints and sinners in the Biden administration, and in every bank and investment house and school and church in the country. The popular vote favoring Trump is a plea for someone to do something different. Not all supporters of Trump are sinners.

        Other countries have elected unwise leaders and survived--think of Argentina and Brazil. We will muddle through.

        We will muddle through and abandon the vision of the saintly institution. We will try to distinguish saints from sinners in whatever institution we live in. We will praise the saints and call the sinners, gently, to repentance. Punishment is not the way to create a saintly institution. We will acknowledge that we are all partly saint and partly sinner, and that it is hard to tell the difference this side of eternity. So we will treat our fellow saintly sinners the way we would like to be treated ourselves.

        This is the way Christianity says we should live. If we live that way we might be able to call ourselves a Christian society.

        But we should quit calling ourselves that. There are people among us who are not Christian and who feel excluded when we say things like that. We should call ourselves sinful/saintly followers of Jesus Christ, trying to live peacefully with people who see God differently from how we see God. We do not own God. We do not control God. We do not have a monopoly on knowledge of God, and still less on living the way God wants us to live.

        We are all learners. Jesus said "make disciples of all nations." A disciple is a learner. To learn means to change your mind.

        To learn means to repent.

  

On abortion as an issue of natural law

[I wrote this in 2007. It still seems relevant.]

      "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

      Thomas Jefferson began his argument for independence with these words.

      Traditional Catholic theology held certain truths to be self-evident, and other truths to be true but not self-evident. The former were based on natural law, while the latter were known only by the light of revelation. For example, it was self-evident, a truth of natural law, that murder is wrong, but not self-evident that one had to be baptized in order to be saved. Natural law was known by all people of good will. Truths known by revelation were known only by people who had been exposed to revelation as taught by the Church.

      This distinction was central to the argument used by John Kennedy in his speech to Protestant ministers in 1960, the speech in which he defended himself against the claim that if he were elected president, he would have to enforce moral precepts held as true by the Church. He argued that a Catholic politician in this country was not bound to enforce moral truths that were known only by the light of revelation. Catholic politicians must enforce self-evident moral truths, but are under no greater obligation to do that than any other person of good will. Issues of natural law have to be decided by following the rules of political debate and decision.

      This argument broke with the traditional European understanding that political leaders had the right and the duty to enforce what they believed to be true, even when those truths were not held by people of other faiths. The maxim was "error has no rights." The argument had proceeded from the time of the Thirty Years War, in which Catholics and Protestants used violence to enforce their beliefs, through the principle cuius regio, eius religio, which could be translated as "whatever religion the king espouses, the people should also espouse." That was a principle that at least reduced violence. In John Courtney Murray's phrase, it was an "article of peace."

      The historical story could be told that the American colonies, through their experience of flight from religious persecution in Europe and of living in relative peace with people of competing faiths, had discovered a strategy that greatly increased the prospects of peaceful coexistence. Catholics could understand the strategy in terms of natural law versus revelation, and this is the distinction that freed John Kennedy and opened the way for his election.

      The distinction between natural law and revelation is central to the stance being taken by Catholic bishops on the issue of abortion. We are not, they say, trying to enforce our denominational beliefs on the rest of society. Everyone should know that abortion is murder, and that murder is self-evidently wrong. We have every right to attempt to punish the behavior by means of civil institutions.

      It is hard for those of us accustomed to a post-Kennedy tradition to appreciate how the discussion has imperceptibly slipped back into a pre-1960 mentality. We have slipped into the pre-1960 mentality by placing the Church in official opposition to a political order. The Church has become a player in the political game, not just in the sense that its members have personal beliefs that they attempt to realize, but in the sense of overt, structural attempts to control. Bishops are denying Communion to politicians.

      What we Catholics too often fail to realize is that many people are opposed to making abortion illegal because of their own sincere religious beliefs. We have become too convinced by the anti-abortion argument that anyone favoring the legality of abortion must be motivated by financial incentives. I have become convinced by conversation with pro-choice people that their statement that they are pro-choice, not pro-abortion, is sincere. They believe that abortion in the early stages of pregnancy is not murder. (Recall that, in spite of what we have been told by Church leaders in recent years, for centuries official Catholic Church teaching held the same position. The term used was "ensoulment," which meant that there was a point in time, sometimes months after conception, when the fetus became "ensouled," possessed of an immortal soul.) Beyond that moral evaluation of abortion itself, there are additional reasons why one could be pro-choice. As Robert Drinan once argued, it is not always wise to attempt to enforce a moral principle by legal means. It can be argued that a law against abortion is unenforceable, because it involves behavior that is hidden--in fact, more hidden than almost any other behavior that is not now criminalized. Few people would want to see a woman imprisoned because she had procured an abortion, yet that is what making abortion illegal would do. One can only imagine the kinds of symbolic protests that would follow, similar to the protests in the 1960's that caused legislatures to overturn laws that made contraception illegal. Making abortion illegal would result in women using illegal means to procure the abortion, means which are by nature uncontrolled by open medical practice and which often result in injury or death to the woman as well as to the fetus.

      The bottom line of my argument therefore is that, in light of widespread public disagreement with the belief that abortion is murder, and that it is not wise to attempt to prevent it by law, our position is not based on natural law but on revelation. The belief is not self-evident to all people of good will, but it is a denominational belief, something not to be enforced on those of other faiths.

      By framing the argument in terms of natural law, we have allowed the Church to be dragged back into the same position that it traditionally had in Europe, where Church leaders defended their right to tell the State what it should do. The result has been the same here as it was in Europe: a divisiveness that poisons political discourse, causing people to accuse their opponents of bad faith, people to be dealt with not by political discussion, but only by means of naked political power.

      The smell and taste of power is seductive. Fundamentalist Protestants may be excused when they taste it for the first time, after a tradition of rejection of politics. We Catholics should have learned from our experience. Things go better when we refrain from trying to run the state. Abortion should be dealt with as a matter of faith, not as a matter of self-evident truth. We should concentrate on persuading our own people of the values that we believe are at stake. We are under no obligation to make everyone else come along.